Youth and the Race. A Study in the Psychology of Adolescence
- REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
- Author:
Edgar James Swift. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912.
Pp. x + 342.
The author of “Mind in the Making” has scored another triumph and has given us in “Youth and the Race” a psychologically truthful picture of the real boy. “The role which racial instincts play in the emotions, intellect, and will of children,” says Professor Swift in his preface, “has been the subject of many investigations in recent years by those interested in the psychology of childhood. These studies, however, have had but slight effect upon the methods of the schools. This book is an attempt to show the possible application of some of these results to the education of children… . The author has tried to indicate how the schools may help to transform into intellectual and moral forces the racial instincts which, as manifestations of original sin, distressed our forefather’s.” Professor Swift is a member of the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and is therefore a citizen of the state where Mark Twain spent his own boyhood and amassed the experiences which he later wove into that unrivalled classic of adolescence, “Tom Sawyer”. With admirable restraint Professor Swift forbears to mention “T6m Sawyer” or the other scapegrace “Huckleberry Finn,” assuming tacitly that his readers need no introduction to those worthies. Very few, indeed, of the stories he tells to illustrate the child’s appetite for adventure are taken from books. The greater number are clipped from New York and St. Louis newspapers, and although they are evidently embroidered by the hands of reporters who have not the thousandth part of Mark Twain’s genius, the stories go to prove that the spirit of youth is springing to-day as abundantly as ever from the unquenchable source of the race-stream. Professor Swift urges “the imperative necessity of creating an environment for the child which shall not only keep pace with his racial and neural growth, but which shall be freed from obstacles to growth. … One is often amazed at the difficulty of the tasks which children undertake. Their available energy seems inexhaustible when they have freedom to act and interact among themselves… enthusiasm frees the mind from restraints.” He brings a grave accusation,?and who shall say it is not just??against the public schools, and concludes by saying, “The racial and social instincts are exhaustless storage-batteries of nervous energy, and it is the direction of these forces rather than restraint which is needed in the schools. It is no idle charge that teachers do not know what they are trying to do. One needs but to read the pedagogical literature and attend the institutes to see how indefinite are their1 purposes. Yague phrases about mental discipline and moral training have long been the school-masters’ chief asset. It is time for them to take an account of stock and reorganize before the outraged public puts the schools in the hands of receivers.” A. T.
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